Marketing is arguably an even more important department than sales. While sales is where your money is at, marketing is what makes you your money. And if your marketing department is good at what they do, your sales department no long has to make the sale but rather just get your customer to sign on the dotted line.

Marketing is also a monster of a job. With there being so many different levels of marketing and with online marketing changing the game every few months, it becomes imperative to get marketing down to a science – albeit a creative science.

Orbis Global had business marketing needs in mind when they built their marketing solution. I love that Orbis offers to “super-charge” marketing departments by offering visibility, speed and collaboration.

Orbis also hosts a creative showroom for a faster review process that allows you to create and annotate digital “sticky notes”, label artwork, make edits and corrections. Best of all you get a complete reports dashboard so that (a) no ‘live’ person in your department is wasting valuable time creating endless reports and (b) you get to see the viability of your marketing strategies by seeing exactly how many resources are going where and what the results are; and with ‘capacity utilization’, you’re also able to make sure no resource is underutilized.

If Orbis doesn’t seem like a right fit, then check out Marketing Central - but don’t judge a book by its cover, or Marketing Central's failure to put basic marketing aesthetics into their own website. If you aren’t completely corrupted by website bling and internet ADD, and can manage to appreciate content, then you’ll see that Marketing Central does have a lot to offer when it comes to online marketing management.

Their time vs. expense tracking is detailed and calculated – perfect for those that really want to get into the nitty gritty science of result analysis. With this feature alone, users can track just about everything from the time it takes to write web copy to the time it takes for a complete product launch from A to Z. Users can also track the estimated vs. actual time for development and/or expenses. The feature makes it really easy to get realistic about your marketing expenses and schedules so you can refine your efforts for greater success the next time around.

I also loved the marketing event calendar that lets you publish one or more media calendars – a feature that’s great for small businesses that also happen to be in the marketing industry and/or want to be a resource for industry events (which in itself is a great marketing tool no matter how large or small your business is).